'KIND OF A CHILL': Small groups began getting a 20-minute look at the Confederate
submarine Saturday, and many described the visit as an emotional experience.

Sunday, October 15, 2000

By EDWARD C. FENNELL
Of The Post and Courier staff

HDL First tour groups see the Hunley

For the few who snared the toughest tickets in town, standing by
a tank of clear water containing the recovered Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley was an
emotional experience.
"It gives you kind of a chill to think about it," said
Wayne Poplin of Charleston, who was with his wife, Debbie Poplin, and two friends in the
first tour group.
"It was awesome, very moving. It was smaller than I
expected," Debbie Poplin said.
Tour groups were limited to 30 people and the time beside the
Hunley to about 20 minutes. Tickets to enter the Warren Lasch Conservation Center at the
former naval base, where the Hunley is being preserved and studied, are even hotter than
those for this year's South Carolina-Clemson football game.
More than 6,000 tickets, at $10 each, were sold via telephone and
the Internet, for four weekends of tours. Orders came from as far away as Germany and
California.
Big bucks are being offered for tickets, with some reportedly
being offered for auction - bids start at more than five times face value - on the
Internet's E-bay site.
"I received a letter offering $1,000 for a ticket,"
State Sen. Glenn McConnell, chairman of the Hunley Commission, said Saturday.
"All of us on the commission are being besieged with
requests to get people into the facility," he said.
The extraordinary effort needed to get tickets was described by
Sherrill Mills of Ladson, among the first to tour.
"I started at 7:30 in the morning and kept hitting redial
till 3:30 in the afternoon to get tickets," she said.
Mills' daughter, Stacey Mills, a College of Charleston elementary
education major, said she was surprised the Hunley looks so different from the way it has
been portrayed in movies, illustrations and reproductions.
Because so much work remains to be done - especially once the
Hunley's interior is exposed in about a month - time for tours is limited, McConnell said.
The senator disclosed some new findings concerning
the Hunley, a Confederate secret weapon that in 1864 became the first submarine to sink
another vessel in combat. The Hunley and its crew of nine vanished after sinking the
Housatonic off Sullivan's Island. The sub was found in 1995, raised and brought to the
conservation center in North Charleston in August.
McConnell said scanning devices have determined
the sub is 80 percent filled with silt - which he said raises hopes that artifacts and
even human remains may be preserved.
"It's a treasure trove of history, a coffin and a time
capsule," McConnell said.
He said items inside may include canteens, pistols, photographs,
food and perhaps even the gold coin that sub commander Lt. George Dixon is rumored to have
carried.
He said fiber optic probes showed the boat's rivets are tight,
that no seams have been broken and there are no separations anywhere in the
half-inch-thick iron plates that make up the hull.
"That submarine is solid," he said.
The iron has fared well against the harsh undersea environment,
with only 1/100th of an inch of iron - about the depth of a scratch - having been lost, he
said.
Apparently the only break in the vessel is in the forward conning
tower. A theory that has gained momentum since the sub's recovery is that a Union sailor's
bullet fired in an attempt to repel the Hunley's attack shattered a glass viewing port on
the conning tower and let water cascade in.
Researchers still haven't determined the best way to open up the
Hunley. "The real sizzle is yet to come," McConnell said.
For the lucky people who toured there was sizzle enough.
Wayne Poplin, who wore a Robert E. Lee pin on his collar,
recalled the Hunley was legendary to kids growing up in the Lowcountry. "Its always
been a point of interest that we talked about in Charleston," he said.
"It's amazing, first of all, that they found it. It's
chilling, just the idea that they knew once they began to sink that they were going to die
and they couldn't do anything but sit there. They gave their lives for something they
believed in. We should all be so patriotic," Poplin said.
He said he's always wanted to know what sank the Hunley.
"That's the mystery. I hope they figure it out in my
lifetime," Poplin said.
Tom Crabtree of Spartanburg, a WSPA TV news anchor, and his wife
Gayle, both love history and celebrated their wedding anniversary by coming to see the
Hunley.
"I said to myself, 'Nine brave sailors are still inside
there.' It was chilling," Crabtree said.
"It does resemble the German World War I U-Boat. It was so
far ahead of its time. I wonder, what if the Hunley had not only been successful but had
come back. And what if the Confederacy had built 50 of them, how different the outcome of
the war might have been," Crabtree said.
Tom Atchison of Charleston also noted the advanced technology the
Hunley represented.
"It's unbelievable to consider that 136 years ago they could
have engineered a submarine like that. The thing that's amazing is the size of it, how
confined the sailors were, and that nine sailors crowded inside there were the manpower to
push the thing," he said.